Shades of Life
by shinealightonme
Summary: Life never quite goes the way Jackie thinks it will. Written for LJ's matrithon, with the prompt "Jackie Tyler, across the universe."


They hadn't planned on the baby, but somehow Jackie isn't too surprised; since when had life run according to plan, at least, it never did in _her_ universe, so why should it in this one?

Pete loves making plans, same as she remembers, although now he can actually get them to work out right on occasion, so it's taking him a lot more time to get used to it. You'd think after everything else, that this – a baby, made in the normal, ordinary way – wouldn't be such a hard idea to wrap your head around.

Or maybe not. Jackie forgets sometimes that its new to him, that he's just becoming a parent now. For him, this isn't "again." And even in her universe, he wasn't much of a father, and then he wasn't anything, but she doesn't like to think about that much. It's easier to pretend like he's just been away on business for a very long time. Think about it like that and it isn't so hard to settle in, really, minus some details, and she's got her Rose with her and Pete back and even Mickey's here, and she figures the details don't matter much against all that.

At least Pete is getting a bit of a trial run at being a father to Rose – of course, parenting a baby and parenting a young woman are completely different, but any practice is good practice. Pete was always pretty useless at this sort of thing.

He doesn't make much progress with Rose; then again, neither does Jackie. Mickey gets through to her best of all, and Jackie doesn't know what they talk about when they go off on their own, but she can guess.

If Rose wants space, Jackie will give it to her. She's tried everything else, and maybe this will help. She's busy with her own things, anyway, doctor's appointments and getting ready for the baby and retraining Pete.

She quite likes that there will soon be another Tyler, but she's none too happy about the actual pregnancy and birth involved. The bad bits are every bit as bad as she remembers – morning sickness, growing right out of your clothes. Not to mention all the things that are bad for the baby. No caffeine, no alcohol – you're having a baby and everyone treats you like _you're_ the child. Still, that should make the good bits just as good as she remembers. Maybe better. Pete will have to do his share of the work, this time, with her watching him to make sure he doesn't mess up. Rose will be there too, she can babysit. And this child will grow up in luxury, everything it wants right within its grasp – no, hang on, she doesn't want her kid to be some spoiled lazy brat.

That wasn't something she'd had to worry about with Rose. Pete wasn't lying when he said he was very rich, and it's one more thing Jackie has to learn to remember about her life now. That's almost stranger, really, than everything else, because it's just unlikely. The impossible lost its shine pretty quickly; it's the possible coming true that really throws her for a loop.

Pete's money isn't something she's going to complain about, though – except when he spends it on something absolutely _moronic_, what does he even want a boat for, it's not like they'd ever use the stupid thing – and there's no doubt that his money and his connections wave away a lot of awkward questions. No, his wife didn't die, that was a mistake, and yes of course they've always had a daughter.

But even the money doesn't do Jackie much good with the little things that pop up.

The cars here work differently. Not so much that she can't drive, but she's clumsy about it. Pete just hires a driver, missing the point so completely that Jackie doesn't bother to explain, though she does make a few sharp comments that turn into a row. Mickey and Rose catch the tail end of the fight, and Rose sighs and rolls her eyes but they don't say anything. Jackie would have thought they forgot about it, except that next week when Mickey's driving her he gives her a few pointers, offhand, so that's all right.

The grocery store doesn't sell any spices; you have to special order those. Other things are stocked in bizarre places, and figuring out where to find even the basics takes her too long.

A certain offhand comment gets her a lot of strange looks – well, she's been busy, hasn't she, making sure Rose doesn't completely lose her mind and trying to get Pete to behave himself and driving out to bloody Norway of all places. How was she supposed to know they had a President here and not a Prime Minister?

Except she really should know that. One day all too soon her kid is going to be bringing home schoolwork and asking for help and she'll have all the wrong answers. Probably things like numbers all work the same, one and one still makes two and she hasn't had any trouble getting change at the stores, but she doesn't know what other subjects are safe. History is clearly against her, and what about literature? Maybe Shakespeare became a sailor instead, maybe Dickens was never born (she won't be wasting too many tears on that one, if it's the case). This is more Rose's kind of thing than it is hers; Jackie's always cared more about the what-nows than the what-ifs. But like it or not she's stuck here now and it looks like she has to figure out where here is.

They used to have these ear things, Mickey tells her, that could download stuff right into your brain like it was a computer, but no one uses them anymore because of the Cybermen.

It's a bit of a shame. It sounds like quite a timesaver for someone trying to relearn history. But then, it also sounds like an easy answer, and Jackie's learning to be suspicious of easy answers. Whenever something sounds easy there's always something else to mess it all up. Like moving somewhere to be safe and have your family back together, only now your husband isn't the same person anymore and your daughter's all moody and she's _still_ fighting aliens and you don't even know how to get the kettle working properly now.

Mickey's got a lot of it figured out already, but he's pretty busy himself and Jackie doesn't want to have to have him explain _everything_ to her, anyway. So she starts off with the easy things, the familiar things, evening news on the television, and at least that tells her the President's name. But sometimes the news leaves her feeling more clueless than before.

Pete's house – her house – has a library. It doesn't look like it gets much use, but it's there, and it has an enormous encyclopedia set. She just wanted to look up a little bit about England, see what's different from what she remembers, and the article is pages and pages long. There's no way she's reading all of that – except she does. Satisfied and a little less lost, she leaves it be, until a few days later when she hears someone mention a country she'd never even _heard_ of before, there's no way it can be a real place. And she looks it up, and it is a real place, with 20 real pages in the encyclopedia.

She finds some shorter, less dense, less _insane_ books in the library, as well, and she's sorted out a pile of them before she really stops to think about it. They aren't an encyclopedia, but there's still a lot of them, and she's not looking forward to how much time it'd take to read them all. She'd rather that than have people thinking she's mental, though, and at least it'll be something to do when she has to get up at three in the morning for the baby and can't go back to sleep.

The baby's going to be a boy. Pete had insisted on knowing. To be fair, he'd already had a lifetime of surprises, but he used to be more adventurous than that. He used to be a lot of things he wasn't anymore.

She wonders how the boy will be when he's born, when he grows up, if maybe he'll look more like Pete, if he'll play a lot of sports or maybe be one of those shy quiet kids. There isn't enough time in the day to think much about any of that. Something always comes up, and isn't _that_ just like life. The whole universe is infinite and there's more than one of them and yet you can't find a quiet space for yourself.

Still, Jackie supposes, she never had much use for quiet spaces.


End file.
